What is the role of Systems Administrators in DevOps?

In order to find answer to this question, we need to understand the role of systems administrator in IT Industry:

What Systems Administrators does not do?

- SA does not Build/develop applications

- SA does not involve in SDLC in most of the cases

- SA does not do software testing

- SA are not part of the production pipeline (CI/CD process) from the applications perspective

What Systems Administrators do?

These are some of the roles and responsibilities of an SA however not limited to

- SA build and deploy servers or VM instances where the applications developed by programmers are to be deployed

- SA maintains compute services, virtualization platforms, network, storage, backup and recovery, monitoring and security services

- SA responsible of patch application and upgrade of OS components.

- SA responsible of hardware refreshment etc. in a traditional DC environments.

- SA assists in the deployment of application either directly or indirectly

- SA provides infrastructure and assists in installation/configuration of applications used by CI/CD pipelines.

- SA maintains authentication and authorization through user accounts and maintains privileges' through RBAC.

- SA maintains system components and permissions and rights in an Operating Systems.

- SA install, configure and maintain container runtime environments like Docker etc. at the OS level.

- SA install, configure and maintain container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes cluster at the OS level.

- SA maintains OS level clusters Like Pacemaker at the OS level.

- SA takes care of various cloud administration over public cloud platforms Like AWS, GCP and Azure.

- SA takes care of private cloud environments Like Openstack.

Now we need to understand what DevOps actually mean?

DevOps is the combination of

- cultural philosophies,

- practices,

- and tools

that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.”

I believe after analyzing the above points, now its clear the role of Systems Administrators in DevOps.

Since the ultimate goal of DevOps is to speed up the development and operations:

- a systems administrator needs to acquire those skills which helps in faster delivery of his/her services with respect to the above mentioned roles and responsibilities.

- In addition to the technical skills, a systems administrator should build and maintain a collaborative mindset so that he/she could work with the developers with healthy collaboration/cooperation.